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Did the tea party come about because a bunch of old white conservatives suddenly got it into their heads that their taxes were too high, or was it a more simplistic—read, racist—reaction to the election of America's first black president? Let's find out, using science!At least to some degree, the Tea Party movement is an outlet for mobilizing and expressing racialized grievances which have been symbolically magnified by the election of the nation’s first black president,” writes a research team led by Florida State University sociologist Daniel Tope.Your membership in the tea party may have stronger ties to anti-black racial resentments than any declared political values? How shocking! How unexpected! And so on, and so forth!The study, just published in the journal Social Science Research, finds this acrimony appears to be aimed specifically at blacks rather than also targeting Latinos. While that’s somewhat surprising, “The findings suggest that, among conservatives, racial resentment may be a more important determinate of membership in the Tea Party movement than hard-right political values.”
[T]he researchers found racial resentment was a “distinct factor” driving membership, one which was “largely independent” from ideological concerns. “Conservatives who were more racially resentful were substantially more likely to claim Tea Party movement membership,” they write.The caveat to all of this is that it is dastardly science, and the people who are out there wearing triangular hats complaining that Barack Obama is clearly the most tyrannicaland out of control president ever insist that they have not suddenly discovered how oppressed they are and how mistrustful of presidential authority they should be because their president is now A Black Guy. That they just happen to also answer a series of questions about race in a manner that clearly demonstrates their hostility to black Americans is, they will insist, purely a coincidence.
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